Why can't my clocks just get along?

If you have been an avid reader of my blog on my website, you know I usually spend time contemplating daylight savings time, even going so far as to research the reason for it (I still don't understand). The best I can figure out is some rich guy in Germany was out early one morning riding his horse and decided everyone should be up an hour earlier to enjoy that time of morning. Now they (the mysterious “they”) say we do it to save electricity by adding daylight to our evenings. But I think it’s silly to try and save daylight during a more daylight time of year: so when it’s normally dark at 6 pm, it will now get dark at 7 pm. This will eventually culminate in still being light at 10:00pm by the time the summer solstice comes in June, but really wouldn’t 9:00pm be good enough and don’t we have to turn the lights on in the morning now that they’ve made our mornings dark? Despite my persistent confusion, I was excited this year for the opportunity to switch my clocks. It’s not the “extra” hour of daylight I looked forward to, it’s that I had a reason to take the time to switch my clocks. You see, every clock in my house has a different time on it.

I have three clocks in my bedroom and all three are different. They are set five minutes fast for my husband so he'll get up on time, because 4:00am is not a natural rising time for anyone. There is clock radio in the room we both can see, I have a small battery powered alarm clock on my nightstand to wake me up and my husband has a clock radio he wakes up to. I think at one point these clocks were all the same, but they have either picked up or lost time since we went back to standard time.

My kids each have a clock in their rooms; I have no idea what time they are supposed to be (fast for earlier wake up?). I often find myself bursting into my older daughter's room at weird times because according to my clocks she should be up, but according to her clock she still has anywhere from two to ten more minutes.

I have four clocks in the kitchen: one on the stove front; one on the microwave front; a cute, teapot-shaped, battery powered one on the wall from my childhood and the one on the radio/CD player that I usually don't ever set except to make it quit blinking.

Right now there are no clocks in the living room, which I need to rectify because it makes us all crazy. There is a battery powered clock in the family room and two in the computer room. The one on the wall of the computer room has it's hour hand slightly off, which makes me a bit insane (it's a Winnie the Pooh clock and it's just after 9:00am as I write this and the hour hand is not quite on the nine).

Then all of our cell phones and computers have internal clocks. The reality is, I'm not really sure which one is correct. I would think the computers and/or cell phones’ times would be the most accurate because they are the ones that change between daylight savings time and standard time on their own, but I can't remember if I had to initially set them or not.

So I looked forward to Saturday evening. I picked the clock on my cell phone, carried it with me as I compared times on each clock, starting with the computer room. I still gave my bedroom clocks their five minute advance, but at least I'll know whether to leap out of bed and burst into my daughter's room or not – at least for the next couple months anyway. Why can’t my clocks just all get along?